The Sacramento County Planning Commission on Monday made a wholly unnecessary and harmful decision to approve a new public airport on land adjacent to the Cosumnes River Preserve, 20 miles south of Sacramento. The Board of Supervisors should reverse it.<\/p>\n
The Cosumnes River is the only remaining free-flowing, undammed river running from the Sierra Nevada to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The 46,000-acre preserve, created in 1987, is a critical stop on the Pacific Flyway for migrating and wintering birds and considered a “globally important bird area.” It has the highest bird species diversity in the Central Valley – with more than 250 species of shorebirds, waterfowl, raptors, songbirds and others. In the winter alone, the area supports 20,000 to 40,000 birds.<\/p>\n
With seven federal, state and local government and nonprofit partners, the preserve is considered a model in innovative ecosystem restoration. It gets about 60,000 visitors a year. Busloads of people visit every November for the sandhill crane season. <\/p>\n
Here’s the issue: A hardly used runway at Mustang Airport, surrounded on three sides by the preserve, had a permit for a “privately owned, personal use” airport from 1990 to 1997. With about two flights a week, it didn’t conflict with the preserve.<\/p>\n
Now, however, the owner wants to convert it to a “privately owned, public-use airport.” The expanded airport would have a wider, longer runway, 100 hangars and 25 tiedowns (allowing 125 aircraft to be based at the airport). A similar-sized Oakdale Airport in Stanislaus County, with 96 based aircraft, gets 18,000 flights a year. The Sacramento County Airport System estimates a conservative low range of 15,200 flights a year or about 40 a day at the proposed new public airport. <\/p>\n
Can tens of thousands of birds co-exist with this many flights? Hardly.<\/p>\n
According to Sacramento County planning staff, “if a determination is made that the existing Cosumnes River Preserve constitutes a bird hazard within any of the safety zones, it will be considered an existing incompatible use.” That means the preserve might have to fill in wetlands and remove crops, trees and shrubs that attract wildlife. <\/p>\n
This is not just a hypothetical possibility. When the Rancho Murieta airport sued to have surrounding dedicated habitat removed, citing air safety concerns, the county lost and had to cut down more than 100 trees.<\/p>\n
The public-private partners in the preserve, including Sacramento County, already have spent more than $150 million buying lands in the Cosumnes River basin for the specific purpose of attracting wildlife. <\/p>\n
A new public airport is unnecessary. Adequate alternatives exist – such as Executive Airport, less than 20 miles away, or Franklin Field, 6.5 miles west. Executive Airport has dozens of tiedowns available and plans to add 100 hangars. Franklin Field also has a dozen tiedowns available and room to add up to 30 more.<\/p>\n
The county Board of Supervisors, which will receive an appeal of the Planning Commission decision next week, should deny the permit. A proposal to put a public airport on land surrounded on three sides by the Cosumnes River Preserve, with one of the highest bird concentrations in the state, makes no sense at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Sacramento County Planning Commission on Monday made a wholly unnecessary and harmful decision to approve a new public airport on land adjacent to the Cosumnes River Preserve, 20 miles south of Sacramento. The Board of Supervisors should reverse it. The Cosumnes River is the only remaining free-flowing, undammed river running from the Sierra Nevada […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4325,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-360990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}